23 October 2008

Orient-Express provides luxury travel experiences for the discerning traveller

Orient-Express Hotels needed to streamline its entire financial processes and consolidate 147 separate company accounts into a single system. The deployment of a remotely hosted financials solution by Epicor has delivered numerous benefits. Mark Webb reports.

Since its founding in 1976, Orient-Express Hotels has provided luxury travel experiences for discerning travellers in areas of outstanding cultural, historic or recreational interest. With 2006 revenues of US$492.8m (€314m), the group is an expansive global hospitality business with interest in 40 countries across the world.

The company has a diverse and expansive hospitality portfolio including hotels, restaurants, trains and cruise ships. The company believes that discerning travellers will choose a famous individual property in preference to a chain brand; so none of its businesses are called Orient-Express except the renowned Venice Simplon-Orient-Express luxury train, which operates through Europe linking London, Paris and Venice. Some of the Orient-Express collection of luxury hotels and resorts around the world include renowned Hotel Cipriani in Venice, Hotel Splendido in Portofino, the Villa San Michele in Florence, the Mount Nelson in Cape Town, the 21 Club in New York and the Observatory Hotel in Sydney, Australia.

The group has striven to maintain accurate reporting in a challenging operational environment. Preparing accounts originating from 147 companies, operating in 40 countries communicating in over 20 languages is a challenge many accountants would find overwhelming. To manage this, Orient-Express Hotels originally purchased Epicor Financials in September 2004 starting with a general ledger and accounts payable implementation for its UK-based companies. The decision was part of a realignment of IT operations following a floatation of Orient-Express Hotels on the New York Stock Exchange.

Following the success of this initial project, the group began a consolidation of accounts from around 130 companies across the world to Epicor’s general ledger module, using various customised reports. In 2006, the relationship with Epicor continued with a new, hosted platform coming online to allow the group to benefit from outsourced IT management, including maintenance of customisations and Microsoft SQL Server database administration services. As the group’s hotels, restaurants and luxury travel businesses upgrade their accounting systems, Epicor is now the preferred global supplier and an ongoing process of migration continues.

The flexibility of the Epicor solution allows us to make extensive modifications to the financial models of our different businesses based on local requirements

Gary Franklin, Orient-Express Hotels On an operational level, the diversity of the Orient-Express portfolio combined with legal, monetary and accounting practice differences which span its global business makes for a challenging accounting and IT hurdle. As Gary Franklin, head of finance and development for Venice Simplon-Orient-Express explains: “Support for local or country-specific accounting practices and the ability to consolidate reports was a major consideration for us when we looked for a replacement for our previous enterprise solution back in 2004. The incumbent solution had been inherited from our previous parent company. However, a new independent status fostered a desire to build a solution more suited to an international organisation with a diverse range of businesses.

“Our previous solution was also reaching end of life and had problems with reporting – requiring lengthy and time-consuming batch preparation to deliver reports. In addition, the diversity and geographic distances between Orient-Express operational sites prompted the group to look at a remotely hosted solution. By effectively outsourcing hardware and software maintenance and taking advantage of WAN access technology, the group could drastically reduce operational IT costs while maintaining strict security on sensitive financial information.”

“The process of implementation was a substantial task,” continues Franklin, “which we managed to complete in just under six months and the changes were immediate.” Reports that had taken days to prepare would now be available in just a few minutes and individual changes that would normally require manual changes were tailored in the system to further reduce tedious process management.

“The flexibility of the Epicor solution allows us to make extensive modifications to the financial models of our different businesses based on local requirements, and then consolidate all the information to a central point for reporting to the board and SEC.”

The centralised nature of the key Epicor Financial system has allowed the group to add on more functionality. In 2006 the company implemented the Epicor distribution modules, to manage their inventory, purchasing and sales orders for consumable gifts and memorabilia from their world famous luxury tourist trains.

Throughout 2006, Franklin and his consultants from Epicor made small changes to the system to improve reporting efficiency and help generate new views on the databases. This was, in turn, expected to provide more specific information for strategic planning. The group also took advantage of two more Epicor Managed Service offerings with Customisation Maintenance and SQL Server Database Administration services. It was decided that to give Orient-Express Hotels the most flexibility, the hosting of the entire solution would be outsourced.

In April 2008 Orient Express’ headquarters in London decided to install a supplier invoice document management and archiving solution from Epicor, which has also been provided as a hosted service. This global rollout follows an earlier adoption by Orient Express’ US division, which liked the solution and recommended it. Sam Ehnholm at Epicor EMEA says: “In the hotel world there’s a lot of ad hoc purchasing. It’s hard to control how suppliers go about invoicing.” Buying cannot always be centralised but is often from local businesses, a local florist for example, or another local provider. If you purchase centrally from a Staples, you can expect electronic invoicing, adds Ehnholm, but not from the smaller suppliers to the hotel industry.

Using the new Doc-link solution, these suppliers to Orient Express send their invoices to a central office, where they are scanned and stored. They are then sent out electronically to managers in the individual hotels for authorisation, narration and allocation to the correct cost centre. The hotel management doesn’t have to concern itself with the paperwork but can concentrate on customer service.

The invoices are available in a central database where they can be searched, by supplier, hotel, cost centre and so on. Ehnholm says that Orient Express will save not only time and money but also valuable office space in its London headquarters building, where the space is a premium. Rooms full of old paper documentation will be freed up as the documents are moved off premises after being scanned, indexed and added to the database.

Doc-link has been developed in .NET and runs on SQL Server, providing a hosted application accessed by PCs running Windows at the hotels. Orient Express pays a fee so that it doesn’t have to worry about customisation, upgrading or maintenance. Ehnholm says that the hosted solution suits the structure of a hotel business, with its widely spread locations. The hosted solution centralises support functions and IT maintenance. It’s also easier for Epicor to gain visibility into Orient Express’ system when requested, keeping costs down for both parties.

For 2008 and beyond, Franklin believes that more of the group will move to a common Epicor infrastructure: “The project has been deemed very successful and as more of our individual hotels and businesses renew their local accounting systems, it is extremely likely they will also move to a common Epicor-based solution.”

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2008 edition of Retailspeak magazine.

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